Laura Kasischke - The Raising

She considered saying something, but as those girls passed, they didn’t even acknowledge her—except for one with shining black hair who flipped it over her shoulder and looked at Shelly without smiling.

That girl, in truth, looked nothing like Josie Reilly, except that she was a type. Still, it took all the restraint Shelly had to keep walking, not to stop and say something to this girl, to the whole group of them:

Something about the stupidity of thinking you were bigger than death. That you could walk in the valley of it without even bothering to bring enough water or wear hiking shoes.

But these girls would just turn around and walk right out, Shelly knew. They would survive it. They could, and they knew it, and, after all, that girl was not Josie. Like so many others who had passed through her life over the many years (she was, after all, sixty-three years old), Shelly would be haunted by Josie Reilly forever, and would never see her again.

Shelly had made up the couch in her apartment living room for herself so Ellen could have the bed, but of course Ellen would have none of the bed. “You slept on my couch,” she said. “And you put the fight back in me, Shelly.”

“I gave you a dead end to follow for the rest of your life,” Shelly said. It was something they’d talked about hundreds of times over the years—how much and how little difference Shelly’s bits of information had given Ellen. Had they been worth the trouble in the end, since they’d never brought her daughter back?

“No,” Ellen said. “It was the only thing anyone gave me. The only thing better would have been if you’d given me Denise.”

They talked about Denise, of course, as they so often did. Marveling that she’d have been thirty-five years old now, if she were alive.

“I don’t see her anymore,” Ellen said. “I still look for her, but I can’t imagine her now. She can’t be twenty years old to me anymore, but I don’t know who she would be if she were thirty-five.”

“She’d be like you,” Shelly said. “She’d be a mother by now. And a friend. A good one. The best.”

It didn’t matter how many times she wrote it on the board (lie, lay, laid), they always got it wrong.

The students at South Plains College thought Mira was a crazy lady anyway, or just plain misinformed, herself, on the basics of good grammar. She sometimes considered going all the way—writing letters to newspapers and politicians insisting that it was simply time to change the verb tenses. (I laid down last night. Tomorrow, since it’s Saturday, I plan to just be laying around all day. I lied on the couch until noon drinking Budweiser.) It would be so much easier to change the grammar than to continue trying to teach these kids to get it right.

She erased the board, and closed the classroom door behind her, headed for the parking lot, got in her car, and drove back to her trailer.

It was September, and the sky was blue and uncluttered by clouds, or anything else. In West Texas you really could see forever. You could have rolled a coin on the ground, and there would be nothing to stop the rolling for a thousand miles.

Mira tossed her bag on the couch, grabbed a Diet Coke from the refrigerator, sat down, and booted up the computer. As she’d hoped, there was an email message from Matty, and one just under it from Andy.

The usual sweet things:

Classes were great. They needed money. Matty was in love with a girl, and Andy was just breaking up with one, and that night they were having pizza in the cafeteria, not to worry. They’d be home in a couple of weekends.

She smiled as she opened the photo that Matty had emailed of himself with his arm around the new love object. He was wearing sunglasses and a UT-AUSTIN T-shirt. He was taller, thinner, but there was no way to overlook his resemblance to his father. Somewhere, Mira suspected, she still had a picture like this one of her ex-husband in a T-shirt and sunglasses: Clark with shaggy dark hair, needing a shave, smiling crookedly, an arm tossed over Mira’s shoulder the way Matty had his arm tossed over the shoulder of this girl.

The girl was blond. A little chubby. Familiar-looking in the way of so many girls that age.

Or everyone, of every age, Mira thought.

That afternoon, as always, she’d strolled across the quiet campus from her office and to the library, raising a hand to Tom Trammer, who looked to her so much like Jeff Blackhawk (especially in the mornings, before her eyes were clearer and before he looked more haggard than he did later in the day, and older) that she almost called him by Jeff’s name as he passed.

And then she said hello to the dean, Ed Friedlander, a nice enough man, doing what he could at a low-budget community college to keep the faculty—a few with serious drinking problems, and the others with a variety of personality disorders—teaching their classes, and the students from killing one another. His resemblance to Dean Fleming was all in the age and the suit, she thought, but the sight of him never failed to unnerve Mira, start up the heart, fight or flight, although she always managed to conceal it, and to smile.

Clark was everywhere, too—although he was always the young husband and father who’d smiled so sadly at her in divorce court, and then, later, nodding solemnly on porch steps as he picked up or dropped off their sons. A depressed man, growing older, seeming to have been expecting something to come, now knowing it wasn’t going to.

He’d gotten married again. And that also hadn’t worked out. Last Mira had heard, he was in Dallas working in some kind of sports equipment shop. They had no reason to keep in touch now that the twins were old enough to drive themselves from one parent to the other.

And the students, of course.

There was Brent Stone, a nice boy from Muleshoe who wanted to be a gym teacher, and Mary Bright, whose name, unfortunately, did not in any way describe her. These could have been any of Mira’s students, in other classes, at other places, and she supposed she could have been anyone to them in return. They looked at her and thought, she supposed, Aunt Molly, Ms. Emerson, my mom.

Types. Ideals. Reproductions. Representations. Nearly exact copies of one another.

Perry Edwards, of course, was everywhere, but Mira was used to that after all these years. Really, she took comfort in it now when Perry passed her on the highway in his pickup, or said, “Hello, ma’am,” to her from behind the counter at the grocery store. By now, Perry Edwards would have been the age she’d been herself when she met him—but, instead, he was always the age he’d been the night she said good-bye to him in the snowstorm in Jeff Blackhawk’s car.

Sometimes she saw him at a movie, maybe a row or two ahead of her, his arm around the shoulder of some girl who looked like Nicole Werner or Denise Graham, or any of those girls, his hand in the popcorn bag between them. She tried never to think of him laid out at Dientz’s funeral parlor. The nice suit. The lovely job Ted Dientz would have done to make him look as if he hadn’t been shot a few days earlier by a panicked sorority sister with a gun (given to her by a father who firmly believed every pretty girl on an American college campus needed to have one), who had been up late that night reading a book about Ted Bundy when she heard footsteps in the hallway and came out of her room in the dark to find a stranger on the stairwell of the Omega Theta Tau house.

Mira would have gone to the funeral, to see Perry for herself, but Ted had told her that the family had politely requested that she not come—and she’d also received a letter from the university lawyers saying she was not to speak to the media, the students, or the families of the students about anything that had happened. And she was never to write about it.